Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Cord Jefferson at The Root points out that the frisk procedures that whites are now going through at the airport are not entirely unlike the daily stop and frisk that Black people experience every day, whether we fly or not.

One significant difference I see is that whites know they will be friskes at the airport, while New York's Blacks can be stopped and frisked at any time, in any public place, with no notice or opportunity to prepare for the dehumanizing process.

The man who first pointed this out to me is New York Times reporter David Carr, who tweeted, "White people aren't used to having the hands of state on them. Black folks know all about stop and frisk."

Carr is right about that, at least as far as New York City goes. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactic, in which officers stop citizens on the street and search their bodies and bags, was used on 149,753 New Yorkers in the first three months of 2010. Of those frisked, 85 percent were black or Latino. Even more shocking is that 87 percent of those stopped were completely innocent.

I felt sorry for whites who got this treatment at the airport, until I realized that Blacks suffer this everyday, everywhere, and whites don't raise their voices in unison against these frisks of Blacks. Maybe we can chalk this up to "sensitivity training" in which whites suddenly realize some aspect of what Blacks experience evert day, except that these pat-downs are unlikely to result in police beat downs and false charges of criminal behavior.